Katamari Damacy Reroll
WONDERFULLY WEIRD AND INVENTIVE. US$29.99 | PC, Switch | www.nintendo.com
KATAMARI DAMACY IS ridiculous. It’s a vast amount of ridiculous, with a smattering of bad ridiculous which serves to remind you that it’s very much from a previous console era.
You, the minuscule Prince of the Cosmos, must help your father, the incredibly buff King of the Cosmos (also unsubtly wellendowed thanks to a pair of spray-on trousers) repair the night sky. There is no prophesy to fulfil, no monster to thwart. Instead, the sky was ruined by your father partying a little too hard the previous night and now he’s grumpily pressing you into service to fix it.
If you stop to examine the story, it’s pretty bleak. The King treats his son terribly, gets out-of-control drunk, and won’t face up to his responsibilities. But Katamari Damacy isn’t a moral lesson or an exploration of that experience, it’s an absurdist roll-’em-up. The King is a toddler, directing your missions, and the Prince is a silent cursor which you use to push a ball in different directions around the world.
The main missions all take a similar form; roll a certain size katamari to repair a star and then spend the rest of the level’s time limit becoming as large as possible. I particularly love spotting weird scenarios before I roll them up – two crabs with water pistols having a standoff on the porch was one, the mechanical monkey-with-cymbal ensemble was another.
However, I felt the game’s age whenever gender popped up, though. There’s a Virgo level where you collect maidens and encyclopedia descriptions of men and women hinge around stereotypes – a woman dieting for a bikini body, and men banished from the house for golf practice.
These gripes aside, Katamari Damacy still feels fresh and fun. It’s weird in a way that doesn’t feel forced and the joy of rolling up a cat which previously towered above you, watching its little legs kicking about, is as pure now as it was in 2004.